Wants to read Stranger in a Strange Land
book
Wants to read Anansi Boys
Rated The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives 8/10
I have a real weakness for pop math books and this is a great example - brightly written, easy to understand, but gets the wheels turning nicely in your head. <br/><br/>Goes in some depth into the history of probability and statistics, including brief sketches of the mathematicians who pioneered these fields of study, and the role of statistics as part of the history of science.<br/><br/>A surprisingly excellent companion piece to "Twilight of the Elites," which I just read, because it undermines the idea that success or failure is a perfect measure of merit, and investigates our tendency to see patterns and cause and effect and discount chance and luck.<br/><br/>A very smart, fun book.
Rated The Devils 10/10
Amazing and intoxicating big fat weird brutal imaginative gory fantasy novel. Huge (I had to read it sitting at a table). Joe Abercrombie is back!
Wants to read The Left Hand of Darkness
Wants to read Manhunt
Rated Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America 8/10
Not 100% sure how I feel about this book and my opinion wavered as I read it. In some ways the book itself is also the kind of thing the book is intended to critique: a well-intentioned poverty safari, a member of the elite trying to explain to other elites what the non-elite life is like, without really offering the reader anything to *do* about it. But it’s humble and kind enough that it doesn’t come off nearly as badly as it could, and Arnade doesn’t paper over or exclude the reality of racism and the deleterious effects of market capitalism. I don’t know who the ideal reader of this book is; I guess I’m included in that category, though I think I know a lot of the broader points he’s trying to make and certainly buy his worldview a lot more than other people in the technocratic-elite set he’s addressing. A quick but tough read, mostly in the ways it intends, and I’m glad it exists and I read it, but I do have some mild reservations about it.
Rated Passing 8/10
A soapy, fast-reading novel about two childhood friends, one living as a Black woman in a Black community, the other living as white. It's about people and not ideas, but never loses sight of the essential absurdity of a system that assigns status and merit based on ancestry. Predates - both in writing and in setting - [b:The Vanishing Half|51791252|The Vanishing Half|Brit Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1577090827l/51791252._SX50_SY75_.jpg|73423787], but shares its themes and concerns.
Rated Transcription 8/10
Engaging most of the way through, but kind of takes a weird turn toward the end. It's a good story, and I read it really quickly, but doesn't pull off what it's doing as well as Atkinson's other books, which are *so* careful and clever and well-built that a pretty-good iteration suffers a little by comparison.
Wants to read The Black Girl Survives in This One
Wants to read She Who Became the Sun
Rated Beyond the Fringe: An Arcana Imperii Collection 10/10
Rated The Metamorphosis and Other Stories 6/10
Rated The Mothers 8/10
A terrific, sad book, told simply and well. The Mothers of the title are the older women of a Black church in Southern California, who appear only occasionally in person and narrate the book with a collective, weirdly omniscient voice. The title also, though, refers to the absent mothers who haunt the book’s main characters - Nadia, who lost her mother to a suicide, and Aubrey, who fled her home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. It’s a very compassionate story to its characters and a quick, propulsive read.
Rated Children of Time 9/10
Bit disappointed by the end, but I would die for those spiders
Edited 86d ago
Rated Bestseller 8/10
Yet another great one in the series.
Edited 99d ago
Wants to read Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices